


Reproductions

by dornishsphinx



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Mother-Daughter Relationship, ZEcret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-16 14:44:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16955952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dornishsphinx/pseuds/dornishsphinx
Summary: Going back home, dealing with having a new set of parents, having a death game set up to ensure one’s own existence—it’s a bit much to think about during the day, but at night, there’s nothing but your thoughts (and maybe your mother to come comfort you like you really are still a kid.)





	Reproductions

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, kurohawt! Have some Phi angst, as per your request :3 And thanks to the mods at ZEcret Santa for all their hard work hosting this exchange!

Before all this, before Carlos had shot her elderly twin brother in the head, and before she’d unwittingly played a game to ensure her own existence, before she’d discovered her biological parents and her origins and the fate of humanity in this timeline that Delta had claimed he was trying to avert, Phi had phoned her parents.

It hadn’t been anything major, really. She’d just forgotten that she’d been supposed to travel home for Christmas until she got her phone back and saw all the worried messages on it. It was fair enough that she’d forgotten, she thought, considering all the kidnapping and SHIFTing and time travel she’d gone through the day before—though, really, it was up in the air whether anything she had ever done could be measured in a linear fashion.

Anyway. Even though her thoughts had been elsewhere the entire time, phoning them had felt like the right thing to do. Perhaps it was filial duty that drove her, those future timeline splits where she would fail and they’d never see their daughter again driving her to make their last encounter a happy one. (Failure was something she loathed to consider, but she was too practical to not consider that it was inevitable for at least some versions of herself.) Or maybe it had been more about making sure they wouldn’t cotton on that something was amiss, and if that had been it, she’d been wildly successful. They’d not said anything out loud, but they’d not bothered concealing the delight in their voices at the prospect of her following in their scientific footsteps either.

They’d been an afterthought then, before everything that had happened, a check off a checklist of affairs to put in order. Now, though, as she lay sleepless in the dark early hours of the morning after the nine of them had left Delta bleeding out under the desert sun, her thoughts kept returning to them.

What must they have _thought_ of her? Even if they’d believed they knew what to expect, surely they couldn’t have been prepared to crack open a machine beyond human understanding to find a baby from nowhere? Her mother—not Diana, but the researcher that she’d called mother all her life up to this point—had read such stories to her when she was little, tales of Tom and Thumbelina and Kaguya, and now Phi couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d picked them out specifically, like any other adoptive parent of a child with a background and qualities so different from their own experience that they needed to find the stories that would speak to them in the way they couldn’t with their own voices. Surely she’d have noticed the correlation, her little Phi a dead ringer for one of the tiny children from the stories, though found within a machine instead of a flower, a miracle bestowed by time rather than magic and due to an experiment rather than a wish.

One who would rather die than abandon humanity and ascend to the moon.

Here, in the dark, early hours of the morning, where all thoughts are deeper and pettier and more disturbing for the lack of any distractions from them, her determination to save the world and the human race from devastation seemed less significant than the fact she was an experiment. (There was a Phi who hadn’t been one, and a Phi who had been a refugee from a doomed timeline, but she, herself, the Phi sent back into the future—there was no reason for her to have been sent forward aside from idle curiosity.) She couldn’t even tell what the emotion she was feeling was, or what emotions she even should be experiencing at the revelation.

She knew one thing, however, and that was even though her parents had insisted she come home for a few days after the test was over, since they wouldn’t see her over Christmas, she couldn’t imagine making small conversation and laughing around the table at in-jokes formed over years. Not right now. Perhaps it would have been possible if they’d just kept the truth from her: she’d always been their little Kaguya, just as they’d always been her old wood-cutters, and that would have remained a fact even if she’d never discovered it for herself. No, it was that there was no time for left for banal family gatherings and half-truths when the three of them were living in a timeline Delta had insisted led to death, and the deaths of every single human on the planet.

(She would not abandon humanity for a life on the moon, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel just as set apart from other human concerns now, mixed up in such grand conspiracies and realised metaphysical theories as she was.)

She was still lying there, awake and motionless, when someone softly knocked on her door. Phi hadn’t bothered retrieving her glasses and so when she got up and opened the door, Diana was more an impressionist painting than anything else, a sweep of red hair and sensation without solid line.

“Sorry,” said the woman who she’d just found out was her biological mother. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Yeah,” said Phi, “I couldn’t sleep either.”

She stepped aside and let her mother come past to perch on the edge of Phi’s bed, bringing with her a waft of something fragrant. Phi went back and sat atop the duvet, legs curled in a basket, before putting on her glasses. Diana’s expression was pensive, there were dark circles under her eyes, and there was a crease between her eyebrows. She’d not bothered changing out of the clothes she’d worn that day. She must have noticed Phi looking over at her, because she smiled, but it just made her look more tired.

There was a moment of silence between newly-found mother and daughter. It was Diana who spoke first.

“So, you really did keep that brooch all this time.”

Phi nodded.

“So then, that means I got it from you and gave it to you.”

“A bootstrap paradox,” said Phi. She had always presumed that the phrase on her brooch must have meant something to her biological mother, and a stab of disappointment had hit her when she’d learnt that it hadn’t even really belonged to her in the first place. “It’s the same with my name. Sigma told me.”

Fucking _Delta_ had a reason behind his name, while she, named for herself, had nothing but a time loop behind hers. How unfair.

“Yes,” said Diana, “It’s strange. I suppose that means they’re all your own, though.”

“All my own, huh.”

Diana smiled at her. There was something nervous about it. Her eyes never stayed in one place.

“You know, we don’t really know all that much about each other, do we?” she said, eventually. “You were just a baby when we had to say goodbye, that first time.”

Phi considered this. Had they even truly said goodbye? She was, after all, a copy of a copy of Diana’s original child. The great, welling emotion in Diana’s tired eyes shut up that nagging little thought and any thought of voicing it, however: what kind of monster would remind her mother that the child she’d sacrificed her own chance of escape to save had also starved to death alongside her? After all, it wasn’t as though Diana didn’t know it already.

She also resolved to not mention the fact that the other child for whom she’d done the same thing was lying dead in the cold, unburied, brains splattered across the Nevada desert.

“I suppose that’s true,” she said instead.

“If you want, we can talk a bit, about ourselves? To get to know each other a bit better?”

“That… sounds nice,” said Phi.

Diana relaxed.

“Should I start off? Um… well, I’m a nurse, but you already know that. What else… well, I always wanted to go to the moon. It’s been my dream ever since I was a kid.”

How very ironic. A faint memory of a woman created for the express purpose of living on the moon, red-haired and with a caged bluebird hanging from her thin neck, flashed through her mind. She found herself judging Sigma a little less.

“I’m a student,” said Phi. “Classics and philosophy. I was raised by two researchers. Probably the same ones who got me at the other end of the transporter, but they never told me anything about it, so I can’t be sure.”

Diana’s face was intent, making sure to not miss a single piece of information. Unfortunately, being asked to immediately reveal one’s entire life-story came less easily than one might think, and so she decided to bat the ball back into Diana’s court.

“Why did you join the test?” Phi asked.

Diana went horribly silent at that, and Phi instantly wanted to take back the question.

“You don’t have to answer if—”

“It was because of my ex-husband,” said Diana. “He was stalking me and his behaviour was getting more and more erratic. The head nurse recommended I become one of the test subjects to… escape him, for a little while. It was dangerous for the rest of the patients to be around me since he’d usually be around, waiting, or even coming by the hospital to—”

She cut herself off. Her gaze had dropped as she talked, but when she peeked back up at Phi, her face made it clear that she regretted answering so honestly.

“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m an adult, it’s fine.”

Phi had intended it to be a reassuring statement, but Diana shrank. Crap. So, it was true, and here was the proof: even after the game, all that shared time and timelines and biology, she still didn’t have much of a clue as to what made Diana tick.

That she knew her better now was obvious, of course. Her delicate air had, on first impression, reminded Phi of a doll, and not even the hard china dolls people had often compared Phi to when she was younger and more likely to put up with it, but a felt one, soft and pliable (Luna had seemed doll-like too, and though Phi had presumed, after her little secret had come out, that it was just an unavoidable part of technically being a particularly highly-advanced one, she wondered now if it was something Sigma had seen in Diana too and had taken it into consideration while designing her moon-bound facsimile.) During the game, though, she’d come to know Diana more and more: she’d been the one to step up and direct the rest of the team, taking each decision into her own hands during the game, and a decisiveness had emerged from behind all the kindness and empathy. (Luna had been ever sweet and compliant, Asimov’s angel, but Phi preferred Diana’s bitterness and bloody hands.)

And still, even after they’d discovered more about one another, here she was stepping on buttons and stumbling into minefields.

“You are an adult, aren’t you?” Diana said. Her voice was quiet. “I should be able to tell you these things. Still…” 

“We don’t have to talk about it,” said Phi. “Not if it makes you uncomfortable.”

A thought occurred to Phi then: while they’d experienced a far longer period of time, only a week had passed in reality. Even if Diana had gone into seclusion, not enough time had passed to make this ex-husband of hers any less a threat.

A burst of protectiveness filled her chest and she wondered, for a moment, if Mira would deign to take a commission.

“No, it’s all right,” said Diana. “It’s funny, it seems so mundane in comparison to the world ending, or even all those times you”—she cut off the last word— “But if he managed to hurt you because I’d kept him a secret, I’d never forgive myself.”

She smiled, gentle and bitter all at once. The urge to ask Mira about those commission rates increased exponentially.

“Even so, I would like to have you in my life,” Diana said then. “Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s not as though we’re not all in a dangerous situation. It’s a little strange since we’re the same age and all, but I really would like it if we could get to do all the things we missed out on together.”  

Maybe she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how to handle this screwed-up new family situation, after all. Phi leant forward and hugged her mother. It was an awkward position, the two of them too far apart and straining to stretch their arms out long enough, but it was fine.

“Of course,” she said, voice muffled by Diana’s red jumper.

Diana laughed, low and comforting, and patted her head like she was one of her kid patients. Phi let her. There’d be time to figure out proper boundaries and how to deal with a new set of parents her own age later.

“You know, I’m supposed to go home for a couple of days,” said Phi, hoping she wasn’t about to hit another sore spot, but getting the urge to mention it anyway. “Don’t think I’ll be able to, what with everything going on.”

“Home?” said Diana. “Oh, with those researchers you were telling me about?”

“Yeah, those are the ones.”

“You’ve not told me much about them. Are they nice?”

“Yeah, they’re nice.”

“I’m grateful they took care of you when we couldn’t,” said Diana. “I’d like to meet them and thank them—but I know that’s probably not possible.”

True. It would be quite the exercise to try and create a cover explaining away everything that had happened, was happening and was going to happen (and was currently happening in parallel timelines) just to explain to them how she’d met with Diana and Sigma. If they were to pick up on any more—and they were crazy smart after all, so it was likely—it could be a disaster.

“Considering where they picked me up—and, uh, their personalities—I think they’d be pretty interested in meeting you, if they knew you were still around.”

It was true; they were nothing if not science freaks. They’d gladly pay for the plane tickets for the opportunity to talk with her about her experiences, though it would probably be less about Phi’s childhood, like Diana presumably wanted, and more about SHIFTing in general.

“I hope we do get to just be together one day, all of us, even if it’s just for a little while.”

Phi wondered—it was something in her tone that led her to suspect it—if she was including that goddamn old man in that definition of _us all_. She decided not to ask. She’d already determined not to mention the bastard in front of their mother.

Instead, she just gave a bland “me too” as a response, hoping she was wrong, and buried her face back into Diana’s jumper like she really was a kid. For now, there was only that familiar scent and, in the morning, a world to be saved.


End file.
